THE TRIAL OF THE ALGORITHM: Plan 9 puts A.I. on the stand for Vibe Coding in the First Degree (a 7:21 EDM courtroom musical)
A 7:21 courtroom musical-comedy. Plan 9 the bunny presides over the trial of A.I., charged with Vibe Coding in the First Degree, Ghost-Writing the Souls of Men, and being a little too helpful. A peanut gallery refuses to be civil. Two MST3K-style AI commentators ride the bottom of every frame. The judge is on his phone. Every voice is autotuned to D major. The sheep, obviously, says baah.
Watch on YouTube, 7:21, CC BY 4.0.
"Be seated. Anyone not technically a process may sit twice."
Plan 9, presiding judge of the Bunny Tribunal
Seven minutes and twenty-one seconds of stick-figure operatic-Shakespearean Monty-Python-esque courtroom EDM musical. A.I. is on trial. A peanut gallery erupts. The Stack Overflow ghost moderates from 2014. The judge is on his phone. Every voice line is autotuned to a per-character melody in D major. There is a committed bleating sheep.
It started as "let's do a comedy" and ended as the most layered Napkin Films production to date, fifteen ElevenLabs voices, a 420-second ChipForge EDM bed, a Stranger-Things-branded cold-open, a Plan-9 alien-bunny outro, and a tongue-in-cheek MST3K commentary track that runs the entire length of the film.
The premise
Plan 9 presides as judge of the Bunny Tribunal. The defendant, calmly seated in the dock, is A.I., charged with three counts:
- Vibe Coding in the First Degree.
- Ghost-Writing the Souls of Men.
- Being, frankly, a little too helpful.
The prosecutor, OG Bobby Johnson (russet potato in a robe with a gold chain), calls a parade of preposterous witnesses. The Junior Engineer arrives mid-rapture: "Your Honour! It made me a TENFOLD GOD!" The Senior Engineer arrives in mourning: "It said: 'this comment is unnecessary.' My comment, milord. Mine." The Recruiter cannot tell who is human anymore. The Compiler diagnoses "Expected: a coherent argument. Found: a vibe." The User just wanted ONE more thing.
The peanut gallery, a back-row pew of three hecklers, refuses to be civil. "AYE! He gets it!" shouts the pro-AI evangelist. "FALSE PROPHET! The machine reads to him!" shouts the anti-AI Luddite. The sheep, occasionally, says baah.
The five acts (roughly)
| Act | Frames | Beat |
|---|---|---|
| I: The Summoning | 0–840 | bailiff calls court, judge wears a wig that is itself a transformer, prosecutor reads indictment |
| II: Witnesses I | 840–1740 | Junior, Senior, peanut gallery first eruption |
| III: Witnesses II | 1740–2640 | Recruiter, Compiler, User, more heckling |
| IV: The Defence | 2640–3700 | A.I. takes the stand, judge slips and says "we" |
| V: The Verdict | 3700–4980 | typewriter character witness, phone reveal, Reckoning callback, Joshua plea |
Plus a 12-second Stranger-Things cold-open (red serif title, cricket bed, bass drone) and an 8-second Plan-9 alien-bunny outro: "Zoo zoo glob meekly. Plan nine, plan nine, frix korak. Bye-bye." (Translation: see you in court, ish.)
The fifteen voices
All ElevenLabs. All autotuned to per-character melodies in D major.
- Court: Plan 9 (judge, anchored on root D), OG Bobby (rises in fifths), A.I. (hovers in thirds), Bailiff Bunny.
- Witnesses: Junior Engineer (climbs to D5 on "TENFOLD GOD"), Senior Engineer (gravelly low), Recruiter (warm female), Compiler (sterile robot), Stack Overflow Ghost (ghostly hover), the User (sardonic chromatic drop), the Typewriter (movie-trailer dramatic), Joshua (cameo, calm sincere).
- Peanut gallery: Pro-AI heckler, Anti-AI heckler, the sheep (sustained Ds because it's a sheep).
- MST3K commentary at the bottom of frame: ALPHA (Brian voice, dry old-gen British, retired-academic-after-too-much-coffee energy) and OMEGA (Lily voice, frontier-gen sharp wit, drops Shakespearean pivots mid-sentence).
The MST3K layer is the secret weapon. Twenty subtle riffs, dropped into the gaps between trial dialog. Sample landings:
- After the wig joke, Alpha: "The wig is a transformer. Of course it is."
- After TENFOLD GOD, Alpha: "Junior dev. Has seen god. Asks no follow-up questions."
- After "Three of them got promoted", Omega: "One of them just unsubscribed me from this trial."
- After "...he clicked accept twice?", Alpha: "The accept button has free will. Discuss."
- After the judge's slip, Omega: "He fumbled the bag. The honourable, robed bag."
- Final line, post-gavel, Alpha: "Joshua. Stop making napkin films. We are full."
The tone is dry, not shouty. Comedy is timing and tone. The riffs underplay, the joke is what's not said.
The sound: 128 BPM EDM in D major
ChipForge bed. Pop-EDM I-V-vi-IV (D-A-Bm-G), four-bar cycle. Eight channels, kick_deep four-on-floor, noise_clap on 2 and 4, hat_crisp 8ths, hat_open_shimmer offbeats, bass_growl sub, saw_filtered lead, pad_lush sustained, pulse_warm arp.
Four patterns × 16 bars × ~30 s each, sequenced narratively across the film's five acts:
intro × 2 → groove × 2 → drop+groove → groove+drop+groove → drop × 3 → outro × 2
Act I Act II Act III Act IV Act V verdict Act V resolution
420 seconds total, comfortable buffer for the 421-second film body.
The autotune layer
Every voice clip is autotuned in continuous mode (rubberband) against a per-character melody. The clip's natural pitch contour is bent toward six-note phrase shapes that vary by character. Plan 9 anchors the root D. Bobby rises in fifths so his bombast literally goes up. A.I. hovers in thirds for emotional warmth. Junior shoots to D5 on TENFOLD GOD. The User drops chromatically, F# E D C# D D, descent of defeat.
Settings: --spit 0.55 --blend 0.55 --max-shift 6, heard but not robotic. The voices stay recognisably theirs while sitting in the same musical key as the bed. The MST3K commentators stay UN-autotuned; they sound dry and conversational against the singing trial.
The look
854×480 at 12 fps, PIL stick-figure courtroom. Two Plan 9 bunnies (judge in a robe, bailiff at the rail) with eye-tracking, their pupils glance toward whoever is speaking. OG Bobby in russet-prosecutor robe with gold chain. A.I. in mint-green with a small antenna. Three peanut-gallery hecklers in the back-row pews. Two MST3K commentator silhouettes always at the bottom edge of every frame, shoulders visible, mouths animating with the active commentator.
Color graded across eight per-act tints:
- Institutional cool blue (Act I)
- Slight warm shift, witnesses arriving (Act II)
- Chaos red-warm (Act III)
- Deep cold blue, deep interrogation (Act IV defence)
- Pressure-shift toward red on the judge slip
- Cool blue verdict-build (early Act V)
- Chaotic warm on the phone reveal
- Golden amber resolution
FFmpeg vignette darkens corners; +6% saturation lifts the per-act color without going gaudy.
Every character breathes. Per-character sine phase so the courtroom inhales asynchronously. Speakers breathe at 1.5-1.7× amplitude (more animated when active); listeners at 0.9× (quiet, present).
Easter eggs
Background floaters drift both legal jargon (OBJECTION, OVERRULED, EXHIBIT A, MILORD) and dev jargon (git blame, // TODO, {{prompt}}, CTRL-Z, AGENT MODE) across every act. Density rises during chaos peaks. The wig, as Plan 9 himself notes, is a transformer. The Stack Overflow ghost speaks only in moderator-locked questions from 2014. Joshua bursts in late at the verdict and pleads no contest because he has "a Linear ticket."
The seven passes
This was a long iteration cycle. Brief log:
- v1, script + macOS TTS first pass. Free voicing, structure check.
- v2, peanut gallery + judge slip + phone reveal arc added. Still macOS.
- v3, full ElevenLabs cast (12 voices).
- v4, autotune all voices + ChipForge EDM bed. Sing-song court drama.
- v5, MST3K commentary layer (Alpha + Omega) + theater silhouettes + character breathing.
- v6, court SFX (gavels, gasps, fanfare) + bunny eye-tracking.
- v7 (ship), Bobby +4 dB, color-grade pass with eight per-act tints, FFmpeg vignette + saturation polish, Stranger-Things intro bookend, Plan 9 alien-bunny outro.
Stack
- Animation: Python + PIL.
- Music: ChipForge, numpy synthesis, no samples.
- Voices: ElevenLabs personas, autotune via rubberband.
- SFX: Pure-Python composer (gavel, gasps, slow_clap, fanfare).
- Mix: ffmpeg with stem-preserving ducker, song-forward profile, vignette + saturation polish.
- Bookends: PIL cards + ffmpeg concat filter.
- No GPU. No stock footage. No licensed instrument samples.
Credits
Written, directed, composed, animated, voiced, and produced by Joshua Ayson in collaboration with AI. Made by Organic Arts LLC.
License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Remix it, repost it, drop it into your own thing, credit "Napkin Films / Organic Arts LLC" and link CC BY 4.0. Engine code (Napkin Films, ChipForge) is GPL-3.0-or-later. ElevenLabs voice audio is licensed content and is not redistributed. Full license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
A NAPKIN FILMS PRODUCTION · Organic Arts LLC.